Making Sense of Service Providers

How to leverage service providers from BSPs to SSPs to enterprise IT advantage.

As a content development and delivery operation, the Net has gotten big enough to support a large variety of finely differentiated, highly specialized services.
In this Special Report, eWeek looks at the cost-reduction and quality-improvement opportunities created by proliferating service provider practicesexotic and mundaneand examines the management challenges involved in making the most of these varied offerings.

Peter Coffee is Director of Platform Research at salesforce.com, where he serves as a liaison with the developer community to define the opportunity and clarify developers' technical requirements on the company's evolving Apex Platform. Peter previously spent 18 years with eWEEK (formerly PC Week), the national news magazine of enterprise technology practice, where he reviewed software development tools and methods and wrote regular columns on emerging technologies and professional community issues.Before he began writing full-time in 1989, Peter spent eleven years in technical and management positions at Exxon and The Aerospace Corporation, including management of the latter company's first desktop computing planning team and applied research in applications of artificial intelligence techniques. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, he has held teaching appointments in computer science, business analytics and information systems management at Pepperdine, UCLA, and Chapman College.